BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: Monday is “Contact Chairman Oliver Day” (Pennsylvania)

Please distribute freely!

HB 1978 is a short, simply written bill to restore the right of all Pennsylvania adoptees to their original birth certificates without restriction. For months, the bill has been stalled, with no hearings, in the House Health and Human Services Committee chaired by Rep. Frank Louis Oliver.

To move this bill into hearings, Pennsylvania Adoptee Rights (PAR) is sponsoring “Contact Chairman Oliver Day”–a day dedicated to asking Rep. Oliver to schedule hearings.

You do not have to be from Pennsylvania to help. Please join activist around the country and contact Rep. Oliver. Messages shouldn’t take more than two sentences.

Call, fax, or email Rep. Oliver now.

Bastard Nation is not affiliated with PAR and HB 1978 is not a Bastard Nation bill. We, however, support the action and endorse the bill as it is currently written, and will continue to do so as long as it remains clean.

This is not an adoptee rights bill.

An unknown number of adoptees will be left behind by this bill, further, it would actually SEAL the records of any child entering the New Jersey child welfare system by way of the “safe haven” baby dump system.

In short, any records this bill would open will come at the direct expense of the rights of other adoptees, abandoned children, and boarder babies (see below.)

The bill has now been released to the full Assembly.

Email contact is convoluted at best. For the moment, at least, this page has a full contact list, click on each individual  Assemblyman or Assemblywoman’s links (not the Senator links) and you’ll find phone numbers and other contact information . You can also utilize the “Contact your legislator” button to come to an email contact form for each Assemblymember. I’ll do some further digging and see if I can come up with a better means of contact.

Also see Bastard Nation’s latest action alert urging letters to the Governor-  BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: Please Write New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to Veto SCS799.1399. I will post it in full at the end of this post.

I submitted testimony opposing the bill, but was unable to be present at the hearing. I listened to the full audio the afternoon and early evening of the hearing.

Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization also submitted testimony in opposition to the bill.

There are other opponents to the bill, a number of them ideologically opposed to women’s autonomy and free agency, but I am sadly unaware of any other adoptee rights organizations who have held the line and fought against this disastrous bill, holding out for a bill that would instead provide full equality to all adoptees and for the abandoned children and boarder babies of New Jersey.

To say that is a disappointing state of affairs is an understatement. Watching organizations and individuals actually supporting this bill that would actually seal records for a number of adoptees and other children has been disappointing to say the least.

It reveals a lack of comprehension of the importance of standing for the rights of those often most vulnerable, unable to speak on their own behalf, with no real political representation and those whose rights are all too often deemed ‘expendable.’

I approach this as I do all adoption related legislation, from the personal perspective of both one who was left behind and whose rights were deemed ‘expendable’ in the Ohio adoption ‘reform’ effort AND from the perspective of someone who was apparently a boarder baby, born in a hospital to an identified mother but who was taken into the foster system, not home with her. Which is to say, I know a thing or two from personal experience about precisely the damage that this bill in New Jersey stands to do.

Sadly, far from an actual open records bill, A1406 will by default, SEAL the records of kids entering the New Jersey child welfare system via the “safe haven” or baby dump program.

The bill’s attached statement spells it out in plain English (emphasis mine):

In the case of a child who was surrendered pursuant to the “New Jersey Safe Haven Infant Protection Act,” the State Registrar shall deem that the birth parent requested nondisclosure and shall not provide the birth parent’s name or home address, if recorded on the child’s birth certificate. The Division of Youth and Family Service (DYFS) in the Department of Children and Families is directed to notify the State Registrar when a child is surrendered pursuant to that law to enable the Registrar to identify the certificate of birth in order to deem that the birth parent requested nondisclosure.

For any child passing through the “safe haven” intake path, they will be treated from the outset as if they were vetoed from birth, by default. Their records will be sealed from them, barring a parent later being able to somehow prove they are the parent and also somehow remove the auto-veto, these kids will be screwed for their lifetimes.

As I’ve documented here on my blog before, New Jersey is one of the states counting boarder babies, those born in hospitals to identified mothers into it’s baby dump system. (See New Jersey- Boarder Babies being folded into “Safe Haven” statistics.)

As these abandoned children and boarder babies enter the child welfare system, some will be adopted, but others will enter the foster care system. Normally, a child’s records are only sealed upon adoption, but under New Jersey’s A1406, all of the kids deemed “safe haved” would have their records sealed, thus producing for the first time a NEW set of kids with sealed records, some of whom would be foster kids with sealed records. This is unprecedented nationally.

A1406 would also enshrine in New Jersey law a newly constructed state granted privilege, that of parental disclosure vetoes over adoptee’s access to our birth certificates.

It is, at it’s core, a conditional access fake “restoration of adoptee rights” bill that includes a provision for contact through intermediaries, a provision in the vetoes that “birthmothers” must sign over medical, cultural, and social histories if they want the veto, otherwise their veto is disreguarded. (This essentially extorts personal medical information out of mothers if they want to use the state constructed veto, a likely HIPAA violation.)

The bill once again creates the intentional conflation around the term “contact preference form.”

Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, and Alabama’s “contract preference form” has no force of law behind it, they do not not bar adoptees from gaining access to their original documentation.

New Jersey’s 1406’s so called “document of contact preference” on the other hand is actually a disclosure veto cloaked in the language of “preference.” It WOULD prevent adoptees from gaining access to their original birth certificates.

This is precisely the form of “language creep” I’ve warned about in relation to these contact preference documents for years now. As I wrote in my earlier post, Adoptee Rights 101: Class Bastard and how to recognize a genuine adoptee rights bill, the first “contact preference form” was created as part of the struggle to open Oregon’s records. It was not in the ballot measure Oregon voters voted on, but was a later addition.

Section 7 also merits special attention as it too is antithetical to adopteed people, and our familys’ civil rights, our right to avail ourselves of legal remedy in the wake of wrongdoing:

7.    (New section)  a. A person, firm, partnership, corporation, association or agency that has placed a child for adoption shall not be liable in any civil or criminal action for damages resulting from information provided by the State Registrar pursuant to this act.

b.    An employee, agent or officer of the Department of Health and Senior Services who is authorized by the Commissioner of Health and Senior Services to disclose information relating to the certification of birth pursuant to this act, shall not be liable for:

(1) disclosing information based on a written, notarized request submitted in accordance with this act; and

(2) any error or inaccuracy in the information that is disclosed after receipt of a written, notarized request submitted in accordance with this act, and any consequence of that error or inaccuracy.

In short, it would create a liability shield.

Without the ability to pursue our rights in a court of law, we have no hope of our rights being upheld.

This is a massive gift to the industry (as well as the government itself.) Section 7 is little more than a government bail out for erasing industry and state misdeeds in the course of handling our information.

Need a real world example of whose rights this stands to curtail?

Take my post about a story from New Jersey, Catholic Charities offers up another lifetime’s worth of lies and false “reunion”, in which the supposed “reunion” New Jersey’s Catholic Charities facilitated turned out to be just another lie once revealed by a DNA test.

The Adoptee was mismatched and the Family in question was left with no means by which to regain genuine information about where their child actually went other than pursuing the matter in the courts.

As the article my post is based upon, Three decades after adoption, DNA test reveals painful truth, points out, sometimes the courts are the only recourse left open to individuals and families who get screwed by the state and those facilitating in the “reunion industry:”

Angry, and worried about his first-born son’s fate, Ryba consulted with a private investigator. He even tried to file missing person and kidnapping reports with the New Jersey attorney general’s office. He said he was turned away.

As Ryba continues to search for answers, he recognizes that a lawsuit may be his only option. But so far, he has been unable to find an attorney willing to take his case. He also worries about the cost.

Yet New Jersey 1406 stands to close off precisely those legal options. It takes away the final avenue left open to those with no other recourse.

For the liability shield aspects alone, this bill then becomes antithetical to adoptees and our families’ rights.

Obviously, these are but a few of the many fatal flaws with the legislation.

Bastards holding out for a genuine adoptee rights bill, yes after the 30 years of pre-existing work in New Jersey which STILL have not resulted in a clean bill this year, find themselves in some weird middle.

We do not support the bill.

Other adoptees and bill supporters have co-opted so much of the terminology and the core arguments of genuine adoptee rights efforts, yet they utilize such in service to supporting a bill that will ultimately seal yet more records, those of some of New Jersey’s most vulnerable and politically voiceless kids.

The Bastard Nation action alert makes it plain:

Promoters of the bill have co-opted the language of the real adoptee rights movement and real obc access laws by equating their bill to Oregon’s law, which through ballot initiative, restored the right of all that state’s adoptees to the unrestricted right to their own original birth certificates.

Opponents of the bill fight it for their own reasons, (some of which are altogether little more than industry ass covering.)

Bastards oppose it from our own, uniquely Bastard-centric stance (as well as a stance  supportive of our parents, particularly our mother’s genuine personal medical privacy rights.)

This makes us distinct from the factions arguing  both in support and opposition who gave testimony at the hearing. We are a third thing; Bastards opposing the bill from a position of wanting to ensure equality in the eyes of the law WHILE supporting our families’ medical privacy.

Family medical information is best left to families, not newly constructed state bureaucracies, exactly as it is for non-adopted individuals.

I cannot speak for others, but for myself personally, this puts my personal position in close alignment to for example,  Senior Mothers Adoption Activist Coalition (SMAAC.) But then, being situated thusly should surprise no one who has been reading along as I self identify as both a Radical Feminist and a Bastard.

I see no inherent contradiction in supporting the genuine rights of Mothers and simultaneously supporting Bastard rights.

It is primarily the lies of the industry and surrounding culture that set adoptees and mothers against one another politically. In reality, more often than not our interests, particularly in seeing all our personal documentation restored to us tend to align more often than not.

As for the hearing itself, we certainly heard plenty of that pitting Mothers against Bastards and blathering about “balancing rights.”

It was quite possibly one of the most ensnared in non-sequiturs,  reunification-centric, conflationary and extraordinary uses of co-opted language hearings I’ve ever endured listening to in all my years of Bastard activism.

The usual false tropes were brought up:

• many on both sides arguing their stance would result in further abortion reduction/curtailment (whether one used such to support or oppose the bill, the core argument is antithetical to women’s genuine reproductive autonomy. Each individual woman who determines for herself she needs an abortion is a sample of one. When the state begins to set goals for ‘how many is too many women always pay the price.)
• false notions of presumed/alleged/expectations of “birthparent privacy” and supposed “balancing of rights” (which the courts have repeated rejected, see both the Tennessee and Oregon cases. Oregon was appealed to the supreme court, but rejected, finding that the circuit court had correctly decided the matter.)
• the intentional conflations surrounding  “contact preferences” (a contact preference form is not a disclosure veto, nor contact veto)
• the same old same old “opt in” vs “opt out” irrelevancies (both stances support legislation that still curtail Bastard access)
• alleged “needs” for counseling and intermediaries (as we are considered somehow distinct and separate from other adults deemed legally competent to conduct their own interpersonal and family affairs)
• registries and vetoes as some form of adequate substitute for adopted people’s equality (similar to my point above, though also a demand that the state construct systems to collect, maintain and dispense deeply personal information such as personal medical histories as somehow cognized as some form of adequate substitute for adopted people’s full legal equality to nonadopted people)
• opening records to provide some kind of psychological “wholeness” or “completeness (not a rights based argument, rather it reduces our human/civil/identity rights down to what would be a mere state granted-or withheld- privilege confererred almost out of pity upon poor needy and emotionally defective adoptees)
• falsely tangling in family medical histories to original birth certificate access (non-adopted people get no medical information with their OBCs, nor does the state construct systems by which to collect and pass along such deeply personal and legally protected private information for non-adopted people)
• etc.

But by the time the hearing was well underway, it was down to everything from facebook privacy settings to outright lies such as (paraphrasing now):

• nothing is really secret, anyone who really wants to find the information will
• 90% of inter-country adoptees already have their information/less than 10% could be considered confidential
• Adam Pertman of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute outright claiming he has “no horse in this race,” when he himself is by his own admission at the hearing an adoptive father and employed by an organization in the very business of promoting the “normalcy” of adoption and adoption as a positive outcome
• Pertman also claimed that going forward those who needed to could always avail themselves of “lawsuits.” Had he actually read section 7 of the legislation, he might have noticed A1406 would specifically curtail New Jersey adoptees and their families right to utilize the courts in relation to information released via the legislation
• the repeated insistence that New Jersey’s “safe haven”/baby dump records are already sealed (then why would this legislation propose to seal them?!?)
• Treating Oregon’s “contact preference” refusals as if they were somehow the same as what New Jersey would experience when Oregon’s preference forms are not in any way legally contact prohibitive and do not bar the adoptee from receiving their original information (i.e. comparing apples and oranges)
• etc.

Put simply, the hearing was a trainwreck, with nonsense and nonsequitors flying by a mile a minute, with co-opted adoptee rights arguments being used in support of this catastrophic bill.

As for genuine Bastard activists?

We’ve been both personally trashed for daring to say anything about ‘another state’s bill’  (never mind the effect it will have on other states, the national precedents in it, the degrading of the term “contact preference” in it, and the fact that it’s actually a sealed records bill and that SOMEONE has to stand for the genuine rights of ALL of New Jersey’s adoptees, boarder babies, and abandoned children) AND simultaneously trashed for not being present at the hearing. (Never mind some of us have real lives, families, and other obligations that made being there impossible.) It’s been ugly.

I may or may not write to that further at a later date. Suffice it to say, I have much to say about what I’ve been seeing as of late out of many so self professed advocates for adoptee rights.

After a hearing the that lasted roughly 5 1/2 hours, the committee voted the bill out to the full Assembly:

Committee Voting:
AHU 6/14/2010 – r/ACS – Yes {6} No {0} Not Voting {0} Abstains {4} – Roll Call

• Vainieri Huttle, Valerie (C) – Yes
• Rodriguez, Caridad (V) – Yes
• Angelini, Mary Pat – Abstain
• Biondi, Peter J. – Abstain
• Fuentes, Angel – Yes
• McHose, Alison Littell – Abstain
• O’Scanlon, Declan J., Jr. – Abstain
• Prieto, Vincent – Yes
• Tucker, Cleopatra G. – Yes
• Wagner, Connie – Yes

An audio archive of the full hearing can be found online, just click the “listen” link next to”Monday, June 14, 2010, 2:00pm Committee Room 16.”

Postscript of sorts-

Throughout our ‘community’ particularly online (be that on mailing lists, in blog posts and comments, in newsletters or even individual’s facebook posts and comments) I’ve watched people’s assumptions are unraveling. Sides are being chosen, and yes, long term friendships have come apart over organizational or individual decisions to either support or oppose  fatally flawed legislation. I’m not merely speaking about New Jersey, but also more broadly, pertaining to Illinois, South Dakota, and other states.

This year has been brutal with roughly 15 states ‘in play’ and next to no clean bills.

New Jersey is its own particular version of Bastard hell in that adopted people and their families have been banging their heads against that particular brick wall for 30 years.

Yes, people are dying.

But as I’ve said over and over, there’s not a Bastard or a Mother, or a family member on this planet that isn’t dying. One can come out to a dead 50 year old just as easily as they can an 80 year old.

The fact that people die is no excuse to gut someone else’s human/identity/civil rights as part of a personal shortcut in HOPES of getting yours (provided of course, you end up being one of the lucky ones not vetoed if the bill passes.)

On the one hand, it’s been hard to watch and truly sad to see these coming aparts yet sadder still to see those willing to sell the rights of the person standing next to them down the river.

Watching in real time as individuals embrace the idea that other adopted people’s rights can be cast aside. The usual promises of “we’ll come back for yours later” sometimes accompany such, but more often than not, it doesn’t.

Regardless of what people say, the reality is both that after people get theirs most pack up and go home, leaving those left behind by such legislation to fend for themselves with an even smaller pool of activists, AND the real bottom line, incremental strategies have never worked, not once, not in a single state.

Don’t be fooled, what bill gets passed will be with adoptees for at least some of their lifetimes.

No state that has ever passed a fake “open records” bill has ever gone back to clean up the toxic mess left in its wake. No state has ever expanded access after a bad bill has passed.

If New Jersey is any measure, bad bills such as the “safe haven” baby dump bill are only followed by proposed tightening and even further sealing in the aftermath. New Jersey’s bill seeks to even further curtaial abandoned children’s rights and access, not expand it.

On the other hand, observing this heart wrenching and tragic process has also clarified a lot.

Today we have a much clearer picture of who stands firmly for full Adoptee equality and who is willing to settle for variations on the theme of second class citizenship. Who believes we can settle for less than being treated equally under the law, and who feels substitutes and further forms of state control, shame, and screwing over both other adoptees and in New Jersey’s case, boarder babies and abandoned children constitutes some sick version of ‘good enough’.

Bastard rights seem to have a lot of fair weather friends.

When the going is easy, there are plenty of people around. But when it comes to standing equally strong for the rights of those all too often left behind? The field clears out quite a bit.

Not that I needed the reminder, but once again, observing this process, this winnowing of who stands strong and who is willing to settle for less than full equality, has taught me in very tangible terms who understands the core concept of class Bastard, and the necessity of protecting the rights and access of the most vulnerable and all too often deemed ‘expendable.’

It has also taught me who doesn’t; who is ok with screwing over someone else to either ‘get theirs’ or ’settle for what we can get now.’

Call it a personal decision, but my support, my time, and yes, my resources have been and will continue to be given accordingly.

Having been left behind by a deform measure, I’ve always understood, that when it comes to Bastard Access- either we all go together or we don’t go at all- “Nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.”

Disney’s fictional characters Lilo, Nani, and Stich have a very great deal to say about notions of leaving people behind. They explain it in terms so simple any child can get their arms around it:

“Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.”

It’s amazing, yet sadly predictable to see some really do consider our real lives, our rights and our real real life families worthy of less.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: WRITE NEW JERSEY GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE TODAY TO VETO SCS799/1399

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT
Please distribute freely!

Please take a minute to write short letter to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and ask him to veto SCS799/1399 if it reaches his desk. The bill passed out of the Human Services Committee on June 14. (NOTE: These are the numbers used by proponents. Two bills have been consolidated and are also known as SCS1406).

SCS799/1399, promoted as an Adoptee’s Birthright Bill, sells adoptees down the river, by creating a new, special 12-month temporary ”veto right” for “birthparents;” thus, exempting the state’s adopted adults from equal protection and treatment regarding the release of the government-generated public record of their births. Promoters of the bill have co-opted the language of the real adoptee rights movement and real obc access laws by equating their bill to Oregon’s law, which through ballot initiative, restored the right of all that state’s adoptees to the unrestricted right to their own original birth certificates.

New Jersey is a key state. If this restrictive legislation is enacted serious harm to the genuine adoptee rights movement throughout the country could occur.

Read SCS799/1399 here
Read SCS799/1399 statement here

SCS799/1399:

*includes a 12- month open enrollment period, starting after the Department of Health and Senior Services releases regs for SCS799/1399 implementation, that allows “birthparents,” to file disclosure vetoes–wrongly called a “contact preference form”– before obcs, past and future, are unsealed.

*authorizes the State Registar to replace the original birth certificate of those subjected to the contact veto/disclosure veto with a mutilated copy of the obc with all identifying information, including the address of the parent(s) at the time of birth (if they appear on the cert) deleted.

*requires “birthparents” who file a contact veto/disclosure veto to submit an intrusive and probably illegal medical and family history form to activate the veto.

*requires “birthparents” who file a contact veto/disclosure veto to fill out the same intrusive and probably illegal medical and family history form.

*seals by default all “safe haven” birth certificates, even though many “safe haven” babies are boarder babies, born to identified mothers and abandoned in hospitals shortly after birth. Some of these children may never be adopted and will never have a genuine birth certificate.

The fiscal note in the original bill has been removed, but the the sub bill mandates the Department of Health and Senior Services to mount an extensive media campaign to inform birthparents of their “special veto right” and other bill “initiatives.”

A typewritten letter or handwritten letter,
no longer than 250 words, is preferable.

Use Veto SCS799/1399: The Adoptee’s Birthright bill in the header and include your name and address.

Governor Chris Christie
PO Box 001
The State House
Trenton, NJ 08625-0001

If a letter is not possible, send an email through the template here.

Bastard Nation’s letter:

Dear Governor Christie:

Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization, the largest adoptee civil rights organization in North America, opposes SCS799/1399: The Adoptee’s Birthright bill. We ask you to veto it if it comes to your desk. The bill is currently awaiting a voice in the Assembly.

SCS799/1399 will permit some New Jersey adopted adults to receive their true and accurate original birth certificates. Others, through compromise language in this bill, will receive only a false and mutilated certificate with the name and address of the parent(s) bureaucratically excised by the State Registrar by order of the birthparent(s).

Bastard Nation rejects the special right of birthparents to remove their names from the birth certificates of their own adult offspring. No other parent has that right. Birthparents should not have different rules.

Since 1999 four states have restored to adoptees the unrestricted right to their own birth certificates: Oregon through state-wide ballot initiative, and Alabama, New Hampshire, and Maine through legislation. Why should New Jersey buck the tide and pass a bill that continues to treat adoptee access to their own birth certificates as a favor, not a right–a right that the non-adopted enjoy without a second thought? Please veto SCS799/1399 and tell the legislature to return with a new clean bill that restores the right of access to all the state’s adopted citizens.

Yours truly,

Marley E. Greiner

Executive Chair

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: It’s Not Too Late to Stop Illinois HB 5428!

DISTRIBUTE FREELY!

It’s not to late to ask Illinois Governor Pat Quinn to veto HB 5428. Quinn will make his decision on the bill by the end of the week.

Even if you have already contacted the governor’s office, please do it again. Let the real voice of adoptees be heard.

Web contact (email) form: http://www.illinois.gov/gov/contactthegovernor.cfm

Springfield Office
Office of the Governor
207 State House
Springfield, IL 62706
Phone: 217-782-0244
FAX 217-763-8710
TTY: 888-261-3336

Chicago Office
Office of the Governor
James R. Thompson Center
100 W. Randolph, 16-100
Chicago, IL 60601
Phone: 312-814-2121
FAX 312-867-0801

Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization once more urges you to veto HB 5428, a so-called “adoptee rights” bill promoted as a progressive piece of legislation to correct Illinois’ long-standing Draconian treatment of its adoptees and their families of origin. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The bill’s stated purpose and its final product are diametrically opposed.

The introduction to the bill reads: The General Assembly recognizes that it is the basic right of all persons to access their birth records, and, to this end, supports public policy that allows an adult adoptee to access his or her original birth certificate. The rest of the bill guts the “recognition of that “basic right,” putting unreasonable and outrageous restrictions on that “basic right:”

HB 5428 separates adoptees into two classes by date of birth and then into numerous subclasses of “access” and “contact” eligibility dependent on parental and state “consent.”

HB 5428 “grants” rights to some at the expense of others.

HB 5428 criminalizes adoptees that use information from the Illinois Adoption Reunion and Medical Exchange to locate and contact families of origin.

HB 5428 dictates relationships between adults.

.HB 5428 is a bill that adopted persons and their families of origin did not ask for and do not want. It has virtually no support from adoptee rights and adoption reform organizations in Illinois and throughout the country.

HB 5428 is NOT an original birth certificate access bill. HB 5428 is NOT an adoptee rights bill. HB 5428 is NOT an adoption reform bill.

Instead HB 5428 is an abomination that stalls genuine adoption reform in the state for decades. It does not have the support of any national adoption reform or adoptee rights organization. As other states move forward to restore the right of all its adopted citizens, Illinois, under the constrictions of this bill, will continue to deny equal protection to them.

Leave no one behind! Please veto HB 5428 and ask the legislature to come back with a clean bill that treats all Illinois adoptees as fully equal to non-adopted Illinoisans.

Update- see my “Late Addition” at the bottom for e-mail addresses and contact form information.

(THANKS ILOpen!)

-BLC

Saturday, April 17, 2010

URGENT ACTION ALERT: Illinois HB 5428 – Contact Senators Now!

It’s not too late to let your voice be heard!

conflates rights with reunion. It confuses OBC access with contact with a parent. It retains the Illinois Adoption Registry and Medical Exchange (IARME), and currently outsources the registry process to the privately owned Midwest Adoption Center as the OBC gateway; thus, keeping the vital records of the state’s adoptees at the mercy and whim of “confidential intermediaries” and paid “searchers” in an inherently arbitrary system accountable to no one.

2. vacates, though parental disclosure veto power (see #4) 750 ILCS 50/10) (from Ch. 40, par. 1512) FINAL AND IRREVOCABLE CONSENT TO ADOPTION which states in part:
That I do hereby consent and agree to the adoption of such child. That I wish to and understand that by signing this consent I do irrevocably and permanently give up all custody and other parental rights I have to such child. That I understand such child will be placed for adoption and that I cannot under any circumstances, after signing this document, change my mind and revoke or cancel this consent or obtain or recover custody or any other rights over such child.

It also contradicts its own language:
“Surrendered person” means a person whose parents’ rights have been surrendered or terminated but who has not been adopted.” (p 11)

3. divides Illinois’ adopted citizens into two arbitrary classes based solely on date of birth: worthy and unworthy. Worthies are born before January 1, 1946. Their OBC is released upon request–like the not-adopted. Unworthies are born after that date. Their OBC release is subject to a lengthy menu of regulations, restrictions and other people’s decisions about access, none of which are under the adult adoptee’s control.

4. subjects Unworthies to five subcategories of parental permission. These categories are not based in a public or civil rights /equal protection and treatment paradigmn. but on state-granted privilege. The bill predicates release on a “special right” for parents whose rights were terminated decades ago, which no other parent or adult has: a special right to deny another adult his or her own birth certificate.

5. Parents (referred to as “birthparents in the bill) are given five “preferences” to choose from:
a. Agree to full release; parent prefers direct contact
b. Agree to full release; parent prefers contact through a personally designated third party
c. Agree to full release; parent prefers contact through IARME
d. Agree to full release; parent prefers no contact
e. Prohibit release of the OBC or certain designated information on the OBC. Depending on the parent’s “preference” the prohibited adoptee may receive the OBC with specific information deleted. In other words, the State of Illinois will deliberately mutilate its own public record at the request of a private individual—in most cases a virtual stranger to the requester–to abrogate the right the “basic right” state says the adoptee has.

6. forces adopted persons who have been denied their birth certificates, to wait FIVE years before they can appeal the decision. At that time, IARME, upon petition, can search for the parent to request an updated medical history and/or confirm the continuance of the prohibition.

7. levies a minimum $10,000 punitive damage claim, payable to the “sought-after relative” against any individual—a CI, state employee, even the adopted person– who uses information allegedly received from the IARME to identify the relative who has requested “anonymity.” How the source of information is to be determined is anybody’s guess.

8. includes a provision for a massive taxpayer funded public information campaign including a website, press releases, and printed notices about the law enclosed with drivers license and vehicle renewal applications. This cost does not include the cost of retention of separate birth, adoption and registry records, general maintenance of IARME, and outsourced searches which the state has no legal or fiscal responsibility to pursue. We have seen no fiscal note at this time, but under the current state government budget slashes, such expenditures are irresponsible and wasteful.

For further information go to BN’s testimony here.

Please contact Illinois Senators now and let them know that HB 5428 has no support from adoptees, adoptee rights advocates, and the adoption reform committee.

Senators have no published email addys so it’s all about phone calls and faxes. Go here for a contact list.

LATE ADDITION-

Illinois Open has compiled a set of email addresses and web based contact forms for the Senators.

Be forewarned, there have been issues in the past, particularly with some of the .gov addresses bouncing, but email and fax are your other options.

As BN said, it’s not too late.

Yet.

See the full Bastard Nation Action Alert for details and legislator contact information:. (I have also added the alert to my right hand sidebar.)

STOP NEW JERSEY S799. SENATE VOTE SCHEDULED FOR MONDAY

Contact the members of the NJ Senate and urge them to VOTE NO ON S799.

New Jersey has been struggling to pass a bill to restore access to adult adoptees OBCs for literally, decades now.

Sadly this latest piece of legislation is just another piece of crap marred by a number of fatal flaws including;

• disclosure vetoes (which will leave a number of adopted people behind, I’ve written about such repeatedly, here’s a recent example relating to the mess in NJ.)
• conflation of original family’s confidential medical history into the bill (a potential HIPAA violation)
• and it would seal by default all “safe haven”/baby dump kids information from them, despite boarder babies being routinely folded into the “safe haven” statistics and the kids having identified and identifiable parents, in essence, this would retroactively delete information pertaining to these kids that the state already had.

The Bastard Nation action alert goes into to far more detail, so I won’t attempt to replicate their useful backgrounder on the bill.

New Jersey needs a real bill, not yet more trash heaped upon the pile.

Really makes you wonder what part of simplicity in legislation in relation to restoring adoptee’s right to access our own documentation is so darn difficult to get one’s head around.

Adopted – but we didn’t know

Here’s a brief  segment:

“I was at my uncle’s funeral when my cousin’s husband wandered up to me and said, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you, because we’re both adopted.’ It was a huge shock – how could it not be? On the other hand, I had an instant explanation as to why I’d always felt like a square peg in a round hole when it came to my family.

“I once said to my mother, ‘I’ve always felt like I was found on a doorstep.’ She got terribly upset, and I later learned that was the point at which she confided in my cousin’s husband. She chose him because he’s a vicar. She assumed he’d keep it to himself.

“My mother had died by the time I found out the truth, but my father hadn’t, so I asked him about it. He was an unpleasant man and simply said, ‘Well, nobody else would have you.’ I threw a cup of tea at him, said that at least it meant I wasn’t related to him and we never spoke again.

“Was I angry? Of course I was. I had been advised not to have children because my mother and brother had both had severe diabetes and had gone blind and died early. To learn I wasn’t blood-related to them means I made an enormous decision based on fiction.

While some Bastards are aware of their adopted status and often have lies told to them about their early days, others, untold of the basic historical realities of their own lives, are forced by default to base their decisions and lives over the course of decades around fictions, lies, and secrets. Others never learn the truth.  All of which can have devastating and far reaching implications and consequences.

Oftentimes the anger in the aftermath of such revelations of those decades worth of lies is overlooked, re-framed as if such were merely a purely “personal problem” (as opposed to a natural consequence of the broader system that often encouraged keeping the truth from the people most directly affected) or simply outright glossed over. I thought the article did a good job of acknowledging the (fully justified) anger that can accompany such revelations.

Adoption has often meant relationships rooted in lies. The hidden nature of such keeps vital information from the very people it pertains to themselves.

This is why Bastard Nation uses the simple chant:

Are you adopted? Are you sure?

Adoption is a hidden legacy (often associated with shame) within many families, sometimes without ever being acknowledged or brought to the light of day.

For further LDA resources, see Ron’s http://www.latediscovery.org/ page and mailing list. (Always linked in my sidebar.)

Ron and other LDAs are doing important work. They have a very great deal to say about adoption and the long term genuine needs of adopted people.

NEW JERSEY: ANYTHING TO GET A BILL PASSED. WE LEAVE EVERYBODY BEHIND!

BASTARD NATION’S LETTER TO NJ HOUSE SPEAKER JOSEPH ROBERTS, JR–PLEASE OPPOSE A 752. ADOPTEE DESERVE RIGHTS NOT FAVORS!

NEW JERSEY: MY CAUSE IS BETTER THAN YOURS. ADOPTEES V GAYS

The core of it all is of course, yet another broken bill, designed to leave some behind, constructed upon the false notion of parental vetoes that does real damage to existing adoptee rights.

One either excepts the basic premise that adopted people should receive equal treatment under law to non-adopted people, or they don’t. Sadly, the proposed legislation in New Jersey is predicated upon the notion that we are somehow ‘different’ and thus deserving of ‘different’ treatment.

The New Jersey bill, A752, has opened the door to complete non-sequiturs like “parental medical information” which simply have nothing to do with a genuine effort to restore Bastard access to our Original Birth Certificates (OBCs). Bastards regaining access to our OBCs doesn’t grant us access to parental medical histories, it merely restores to us access to our own documentation that the State had allowed access to originally, only to later confiscate and refuse us access to.

Just as non-adopted people get no family medical history when they request a copy of their Original Birth Certificates, neither should such be falsely folded in to concepts of adopted people’s restored access to ours. Doing so only attempts to conflate search and reunion issues into the genuine civil rights issue of records access.

Restored records access is what Bastards demand of the State. We demand such based on the premise that adopted people should be treated equally under law to non-adopted people.

Family medical histories are what some of us MAY ask of our relatives. Such requests may be granted or denied. Under law we have no “right” to be granted a medical history. Sharing such is at the discretion of our relations. Just as non-adopted people likewise have no inherent legal “right” to be granted such by their families.

Ethically, of course, sharing what information is available is likely morally preferable, but such interpersonal relationships and what information is or is not passed between individuals should not be state mandated.

As I’ve written here time and again, individual medical histories and family medical histories are up to individuals to decide whether they chose to share or not.

At the core of the Bastard rights position is the demand that we be free to live our lives without undue governmental intrusion into our interpersonal and family affairs, asking only we receive the same treatment as non-adopted people.

When states then insist upon entangling medical histories into state mandated requirements, they do little more than CONTINUE the ongoing pattern of state interference and control over ourselves and our families’ lives. Simply put, it’s none of the State’s damn business. It’s an interpersonal matter between us and our families- just as such is under law for non-adopted people.

Again, all we seek is equality. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Deformers in New Jersey are creating what would be a catastrophe instead, attempting to put our families into the position of being essentially state blackmailed by the State itself into handing over personal and family medical histories, should they desire a lack of contact.

A752 is not an adoptee rights bill, it’s a false conflation of a bill that attempts to push medical histories and reunion issues into the discourse about our authentic need for restored access to our own records, our demand to be treated just like other non-adopted citizens.

It sets up precisely the systems that are the hallmarks of deform bills: false and interpersonal issues conflated in, and separate class of Bastards left behind in the wake of the bill.

Speaking as one of those left behind by Ohio’s contortionist deforms, I know firsthand what it means to have some people get theirs at the direct personal cost to people like myself. It’s why I will never support anything other than a pure restored access bill that leaves no one behind.

Anything this “compromised” bill would manage to pass in the short term will have lasting detrimental repercussions for those left behind for decades to come.

Horrible excuses for legislation such as New Jersey’s A752 say a very great deal about those supporting them. As I pointed out in my WTF page one of the clear indicators of a Bastard is that they are not in it merely for what they perceive as something that might get records for themselves, nor for some short sighted ‘quick fix’ that leaves other Bastards standing beside them screwed and left behind at the end of the day:

An adoptee who is cognizant of and cares about ‘class Bastard.’ I.E. an adoptee who either inherently understands, or has moved beyond caring about issues of equality and access from a purely personal position of merely wanting equality for themselves, to understanding “personal solutions” are not the solution. A Bastard understands that ‘compromising away’ the person standing next to you in an effort to get something for oneself is simply unthinkable. We don’t jump in to get ours now by putting the Bastard standing next to us off with promises of “we’ll come back for you later.” A Bastard understands to the core of their being politically and interpersonally, “we leave no one behind/no one gets left behind or forgotten.” All of which is to say, Bastards have learned a number of lessons from history and incorporated such thinking into their everyday, perhaps now second nature, actions.

If the so called “activists” in NJ claiming to represent NJ adoptees haven’t figured that out yet, they’ve forfeited any genuine claim to representing any adoptees other than themselves and their own personal interests: they’ve presented a selfish half-assed piece of crap legislation that not merely leaves other adoptees behind, but also once again, sets a model that will could (and likely would) be used by other states to screw yet more adopted people.

When you’re willing to settle for what amounts to table scraps instead of human rights, you should not be the least bit surprised when what you get table are scraps instead of human rights.

I, as an adopted person, oppose New Jersey A752.

Sadly if that’s all it did, it could be dismissed as yet another lousy compromised from the get go bill. Merely the latest in a very long string of such. Sadly, that’s not all it would do. Instead it goes further, going so far as to actually erase existing OBC information for kids who go through the state’s babydump (or so called “safe haven”) process, for example.

Marley has laid out the core of some of the mess it would create (emphasis added by me),

Sponsored by NJCare, (aka The Krampi) A752 (aka The Krampus Bill) is one of the worst throw-our-rights away bills on record. The bill, of course, contains the compromiser’s favorite compromise, the “birthparent” disclosure veto.

But wait, there’s more!

In order to make this veto work, the state extorts a family/medical history from closeted parents. Kind of a pay to play scam. If parents don’t submit the government mandated snoop form in 60 days, then The Bastard gets the obc. Sounds like a violation of HIPAA to me.

But wait, there’s more!

A752 also contains the whiteout “alternative” that will give adoptees, slapped with a veto, an “original birth certificate” that’s been mutilated by a government censor with a glob of white-out smeared over identifying information including their own names, and the parental addresses at the time of birth.

But wait, there’s more!

The Krampus Bill automatically seals the obc of all persons anonymously dumped under the state’s “safe haven” law, even if one or both parents are identified on the obc (one of baby dumping’s dirty little secrets). See, a safe haven dump, coerced out of a confused parent ” is a legal assumption of an on file and notarzied “disclosure veto.” Tough, but at least you weren’t thrown in a dumpster. That receptacle is reserved for your rights.

Finally, Krampus includes a fiscal note of $90,000 from the General Fund to finance the cost of a national advertising campaign to warn biological parents that their bastard may be hunting them down with the adoptee-requisite drywall hatchet in hand. Be sure to get that veto on file while you still have your hands to write with.

It would create a whole new ‘right’ of sorts for parents (”of origin”) that sets them apart from all other people. The ability to have our paperwork modified and to demand adopted people go through an intermediary whether we want to or not.

NJCare board member Carol Barbieri, writing of A752 in the Asbury Park Press goes so far as to claim those not wanting contact “will be left alone” as a result of their bill, relabeling such a sick form of “protection”:

For starters, it gives birthparents who wish to remain anonymous a year to file a notarized “request for nondisclosure” letter with the state. Their name and address will be omitted from the adoptee’s original birth certificate. If a birthparent doesn’t want contact from an adoptee, they will be left alone.

Currently no such protection for birthparents exists in New Jersey. Furthermore, if a birthparent wants to reunite with an adoptee, he or she gets to choose how they would like the initial contact to take place — directly or through an intermediary.

All of which firmly inserts state interference into the ways in which adults conduct their interpersonal affairs.

Adopted people’s constitutional and human right to free association, would now be explicitly circumvented. We would be forced down chutes of predetermined contact or lack thereof with government serving the role of enforcer over our interpersonal relationships.

This holds no resemblance to any known concept of adoptee equality, instead, adopted people would form yet another new class, a set of people with what amounts to a pre-emptive restraining order set against us and interpersonal contact not based on any standard of prior actual behavior but merely on our EXISTENCE as members of a a class of people, those adopted and ‘nondisclosured’.

This is precisely the sort of pre-emptive restraining orders on interpersonal contact we’ve seen over and over down through the years out of the usual opponents of Bastard rights. To see such instituted on the back of any notion of an “adoptee rights bill” would be a damn sad day indeed.

Anyone who thinks this New Jersey bill does no harm has missed the horrific details contained therein.

Furthermore, if Bastards settle for utter garbage such as this, the odds of New Jersey ever being adding the roll of honour of states that treat adopted persons equitably under law are slim to none. No state that has settled for “compromised” legislation has ever come back and become a state authentically supportive of our full equality.

The United States according to Bastard Nation-

(Alaska and Kansas never sealed their records away from their adopted citizens. Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and Maine have each entered the roll of honour over the course of the last nine years.)

If New Jersey passes this bill it will instead join the list of states that rather than moving towards equality for adopted people, have chosen to protect the interests and secrets and lies of those with much to hide and much to answer for.

For adopted people themselves to side with such interests, putting forward bills that maim our demand for full equality under law is nothing short of an embarrassment. They side with those whose hands are dirty over those of their own class and long term interests. Such shortsightedness belies any claim to speak for adopted people as a class.

They have been “bastardized” by the State and wish to continue precisely such patterns of discrimination.

There is no shame is asking for what you really want, restoration of rights for all adopted people and genuine equality under law.

Conflating in search and reunion interpersonal issues, state enforced pre-emptive restraining orders, record nullification for those entering the system via the babydump mechanisms (a nice little X-mas bonus, cleaning up an oversight on the part of the dump pushers by piggybacking on a supposed ‘adoptee rights bill,’ nice that. so yup, an ‘adoptee rights’ bill that will actually take an eraser to a class of Bastard’s OBCs) , and granting new powers to parents (that will utimately come down to the State’s whims in interpretation) all at the direct expense of adoptee human and constitutional rights is unacceptable.

Such junk legislation should go only one place, the nearest shredder.

This bears no resemblance to adoptee rights instead, in a truly Orwellian fashion, it guts our existing rights and takes white out to “Dumpee’s” (or “Dumplings”) OBCs.

It’s yet another ‘I hope for mine, screw the costs to others’ bill.

If New Jersey activists came back with a real access restoration bill next time out, I’d gladly blog, write, and work in support of such, but when the best NJCare appears to have to offer at the moment is white out for a new set of OBCs, it’s past time to let this bill die.

I leave readers with the contact information for the Speaker,

Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr,.
Brooklawn Shopping Plaza
Rt. 130 South & Browning Rd
Brooklawn, NJ 08030
Phone: 856-742-7600
(No fax number listed)

email him via his web page: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/bio.asp?Leg=16 (cut and paste) (hit the email link.)

Ask that he allow A752 to die.

After all these years of work, it’s long past time, New Jersey needs a genuine bill that restores adopted people’s equality, not a piece of legislation that will ultimately gut what few existing rights we have left.

]]> http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/12/12/new-jersey-let-a752-die-the-conflation-of-family-medical-history-with-authentic-restored-access-and-preemptive-restraining-orders-among-other-nightmare-senarios/feed/ 2 http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/23/adoptee-rights-demonstration-photographs-and-video-missed-opportunities-abound/ http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/23/adoptee-rights-demonstration-photographs-and-video-missed-opportunities-abound/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:42:08 +0000 Baby Love Child http://www.babylovechild.org/?p=813 So in the end, I made the last minute decision to head up to Philly and see it with my own eyes.

I took a little over 24 hours to decide whether or not I actually wanted to blog this, but as once again, the Adoptee Rights Committee isn’t doing a very good job of communicating what actually took place people are frustrated. Again, this year I’ve been urged by readers to put up a report.

Still, why go?

Lots of reasons. Not the least of which being, there was always the outside chance, I could actually see something that I didn’t expect, that genuinely changed my thinking about this current incarnation of the Adoptee Rights Demonstration / Adoptee Rights Day (ARD). Had such happened, yes, I would have written about that as well.

Ultimately, nothing substitutes for actually going out and taking a good hard look.

So I went, knowing that there can be quite a difference between those creating the events and those attending the events.

Regardless of what some of the “Adoptee Rights Coalition” members have said and done in the past, I still understand that an organizing committee is only that, the key component here has always been about those others who show up.

Particularly so, as the original framing of the event has been that of it as a “mass action” capable of not merely interacting with legislators but of placing pressure on legislators through sheer numbers and dogging their every step over the conference, demanding they enact legislation to restore access to Adult Adoptees’ original (unmodified) birth certificates.

So I was interested in how this actually plays out in the streets, and what it looks like in practice.

My partner, Mike Doughney, “Sleeps with Bastard” joined in. We grabbed our small video camera so we could travel light, and a still camera and headed off . Philly, being just a short hop skip and a jump from our home in Maryland, it was quick and easy.

Besides, Philly holds a lot of fond (and a few not so fond) memories for us, it’s actually the city where we first came together as a couple well over a decade ago.

What we saw yesterday held very little in common with most of the Bastard Activism, particularly public demonstrations we are familiar with or have participated in.

Comparing yesterday’s events to Bastard Nation’s 1997 Bastards at the Bell, “Our Records Our Rights Rally in Philly” (which I was not present for) provides a particularly stark contrast. (Mind you, I’m not exactly a fan of invocations… .)

The very structure of that event was different, focusing on speakers, actions, and the strong visual of Bastard Nation having quite literally raised the flag.

The event took place within a broader context of fighting the states’ versions of the Uniform Adoption Act. Oregon had not opened records yet, and BN was in its early years.

Cindy Bertrand Holub – Pennsylvania Director, Bastard Nation – 1997 Bastards at the Bell / Our Records Our Rights Rally in Philly

Over a decade later, the ARD was to take place in the footsteps of Bastard Nation, the difference between the two couldn’t have been clearer. I strongly advise readers to look though the speeches, the actions, the fact that both Pennsylvania and New Jersey local groups (among others) were represented in 1997, and ultimately, the differences in attitude between the two. But then, I think Bastard Nation has come a long way in its politic since then as well.

Now a decade later? All I can say is that from my perspective, it’s a shame it’s devolved down to this.

While there will be analysis in this piece, much of the core of it is simply a matter of what it looked like to any bystander who was present and in the vicinity of the 2009 Adoptee Rights Demonstration.

The summary?

• They gathered at People’s Plaza over the course of an hour and a half and stood around talking to one another, with a few doing interviews.
• At roughly noon, 66 people (give or take one or two) spread out into a line and began chanting and walking along the sidewalks the 8 blocks or so over to the Convention Center.
• At the convention center they hung out and sign held briefly.
• By 12:40 most of the participants had already left the convention center, leaving a few stragglers behind.

The actual “doing” portion of the event was less than 45 minutes long.

Astounding.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Just as we had anticipated, it was drizzly overcast with the tops of buildings moving in and out of the low ceiling cloud cover.

There were some brief periods of light rain, but for the most part, it was a drizzly mist, letting up well before the noon step off.

The setting for the starting place for this year’s Adoptee Rights Demonstration was Independence National Historic Park, the grassy mall which includes Independence Hall, the visitor’s center, the National Constitution Center, and the Liberty Bell Center, among its many monuments and markers.

At the very heart of the park, surrounded by these icons sits the People’s Plaza, a designated site for protest, dissent, rabble rousing, complaint, and general soapbox standing for those with a cause of whatever persuasion. As the city virtual tour mentions,

“The Park receives over 300 requests each year for permits to hold public events or gatherings in the park.”

So long as a group first completes the permitting process their cause can be at the center of Independence Mall for the allotted period. (The designation of a specified site for expressions of dissent has been a definite point of contention.) None the less, there at the very heart of the Mall is a site where the grass won’t be trampled and the First Amendment stands alongside, carved in stone.

Picture courtesy of ushistory.org

With the first permit issued in January 2008, the People’s Plaza is a relatively recent addition to the Mall, paid for by the Friends of Independence Park who raised the funds for its construction.

The ARD scheduled their event to begin at the People’s Plaza at 10:30 Tuesday morning.

From across Market street, this is what the ARD looked like not long thereafter.

Here’s a nice long shot, the ARD folks have gathered to the left, Independence hall is at the back, and the Liberty Bell Center is to the right.

Over the next hour and a half, they stood in the on again off again drizzle and talked amongst themselves. While there are many things I could say about the ARD’s morning spent at People’s Plaza, the primary impression I left with was a feeling of wasted opportunity for money and time spent.

Seemingly, there was no strategy of ongoing intentional interaction with anyone else in the space, as there were no speeches, nor other central means of communication, they by and large, just hung out.

• There was no banner explaining who they were or why they were there
• No speakers or speeches, no use of sound equipment, not even a lousy ‘radio shack special’ bullhorn
• No flyers nor educational materials passed out to bystanders unless you count a small ARD business card, one of which was left behind as litter on the ground. (Yes, I did ‘litter patrol’, after they left the Plaza.) On the back it stated “End discrimination against adopted persons” without ever defining what possible “discrimination” we might endure.
• No chanting until later, when they got underway
• Not even so much a set of ‘burma shave’ style signs held along Market Street for the traffic stopped at the traffic light

Over the course of the hour and a half hundreds of cars passed, tour groups went by, tourists wandered the area, those who live and work in the area strolled past, there were even multiple TV trucks just around the corner (set up for a separate unrelated event just over a block away). Instead of interacting, they gathered and occupied the space, hardly speaking to anyone other than themselves and a reporter for most of the time they were there.

How this possibly justified the effort to gain a permit, when they could have just as easily (and more certainly in a more dry place) hung out anywhere in the city is beyond me.

As an activist who has been around a few genuine protests in my time, the silence was beyond comprehension. Why on earth would you get a permit to stand in the damp for an hour and a half holding signs upside down and chatting one anther up?

This is one of the few early pictures I have where some number of signs are held aloft.

As not much was going on, I strolled across the mall to take a few more pictures.

Here’s Independence Hall, and the Liberty Bell Center. Those gathering for the ARD are behind me here.

And facing the opposite direction, towards the National Constitution Center, those gathering for the ARD are to the right of the picture…

Having been there, and now, looking at these pictures, I can’t help but be reminded of the words from Ron’s initial articulation of what went on to become the Adoptee Rights Demonstration.

Past marches on Washington by Open Records organizers were a bad idea, poorly executed. I think it’s fair to say that they had minimal effect in changing any laws. Worse, by bringing together a few dozen Open Records supporters in the largest possible venue, they create the perception that the Open Records movement is weak and small. Bad political actions discourage people from participating in further actions. Why should they follow leaders that waste their time and resources?

(Emphasis added.)

The venue chosen could not have made the ARD look more irrelevant and small. Coupled with the fact that all they did was stand around and talk amongst themselves, they could not have appeared more insular if they tried.

Note that the people in the middle of this shot are with the ARD, there is a small grassy patch between them and the walkway, then to the right on the walkway is a tour group, as large if not larger than the ARD at this point. No real effort was made to interact or educate.

Here’s another view with the visitor’s center at the left.

Bored, I wandered up into the Garden nearby, as it’s one of my favorite areas along the Mall.

Still not much going on, people hanging out, talking amongst themselves.

Directly across the Mall from the garden the line of tourists waiting to see the Liberty Bell had begun spill outside. The line goes off to the left along the side of the building for a ways, and as you can see, drizzle or no, clearly there were tourists in the area, essentially, a captive audience, had anyone bothered with a sound system, or had anything to say.

We wandered down closer along Market Street to get a few better pictures. By now the rain was letting up.

As you can see, mainly folks hung out in little knots, talking, finally meeting friends they knew from facebook, and otherwise doing what for the most part could have been done in any hotel lobby. Most of those gathered had their backs turned to both the street and any pedestrians walking past.

The signs, to adverage Joe bystander, would not have made a great deal of sense, for the most part, a bystander would have seen a jumble of bits: the word “denied” in red ink several times, terms like “OBC” and signs about “Moms” and “Daddys.”

Getting in closer they MIGHT have seen “adoptee” although it was sometimes written in a very ‘groovy’ 60’s style font often rendering it and similar terms illegible from any distance.

Some participants wore the family tree logoed ARD cafe press gear. Again, the family tree is a visual metaphor for search and reunion, not records restoration. Others had written in magic marker on t-shirts.

Here are a sampling of the signs that we were able to document, (keep in mind some of these are two opposite sides of the same signs.)

Some simply made no sense without a broader context.

• OBC Equal Rights
• We are opposed to state lies
• How would it feel if you were denied?
• You have yours (Denied) we want ours
• a piece of posterboard made to look like some kind of document with DENIED written in red lettering across it
• Original identity basic human right
• Original identity = human right
• We didn’t ask 4 confidentiality from our children
• This is a legalized lie. Give me my OBC
• Identity is a right
• My identity is a state secret
• (denied certificate) our civil right
• You have yours, mine is denied
• We never asked for promises of secrecy
• I did not sign up for the witness protection program
• Access Denied: Do you know your truth? Name? Birthdate? Birthplace? Mother? Father? Footprint? (Um, Footprint?!?)
• Our rights are a state secret

Others were search and reunion focused.

• Who’s my Daddy?
• Whose my Momma? (messaging issues aside for the moment that should at least be Who’s my Momma?)
• Searching for Identity
• Hi Mom!
• Are you my (heart shape)?
• (A drawing of a family tree with the words) Do you know… (written across it)

Additionally, there was the occasional incoherent rambling sign along the lines of this little gem

• I am a part of- not “apart from” – my birth parents’ privacy.

Perhaps winner for strangest and most obscure messaging ever – one with the sticker and ‘denied’ (certificate) with the single word “NOW!” in the middle (National Organization for Women perhaps? Unclear.)

There were at least a few that gave some context as to what all this was supposed to be about.

• Adoptees deserve equal rights
• Birth Moms support equal rights
• Why is access denied for adoptees? Unseal our birth certificates.
• I am (denied) my birth certificate (which unfortunately, since the “denied” certificate was mostly illegible from any distance, it appeared to read “I am my birth certificate”)
• Adoptee Rights. Do I look like a dirty little secret?

And even several Bastard Nation slogans appeared.

• Equal Rights for Adult Adoptees
• Are you adopted? Are you Sure?

A number of these signs were made together at the ARD sign making party the night before.

As I said, there was no main banner or signage for the ‘march’, so to those wandering the area there was no real explanation of quite what this little knot of people many wearing green or tree logoed things was, other than glimpses of signs often held upside down as they stood around in the plaza.

Finally, as noon approached, some people began to actually hold their signs up, even as others stood around, still talking.

Interestingly, they never so much as posed for a group shot in the space they had paid to get.

So I moved around in order to get at least one clear shot of participants with Independence Hall in the background.

As I said, there wasn’t a great deal of ‘going on’ going on on at the Plaza. Sadly, the shot looks far more active than what was actually going on at the time, but this is probably among the more flattering shots I got.

Ironically, the person holding the “Birth Moms Support Adoptee Rights” sign is a man. (Later along the ‘march’ it was held by a woman.)

One of the few things that was taking place during all this were some interviews.

Sadly, this was about as close to the sidewalk and those passing by as I saw any ARD participant get. The large stone block in the lefthand side of the picture is where the First Amendment is inscribed.

Mostly, though, those gathered stayed in the plaza itself, huddled in little groups talking.

As the interview concluded we were treated to “Who’s my daddy?”

We went for another little walk towards Market Street and took some long view pictures just before noon to get a feel for how many were there. Along the sidewalk there were a number of unrelated pedestrians and tourists.

All told it had been nearly an hour and a half of standing around, by and large twiddling their thumbs.

In what amounts to perhaps the nearest thing this country has to a secular ‘hallowed ground’ dedicated to free speech, the Adoptee Rights Demonstration simply had nothing to say.

Stunning.

At this point, as they appeared to be preparing to move, we switched over to our video camera rather than the still.

As noon came around, they began chanting as they lined up and spread out, walking off down the sidewalk along Market street, chanting  as they went, according to the Philadelphia Enquirer:

“You got yours . . .” came the call from protest organizers.

“I want mine!” shouted the marchers.

It could not have been anything other than completely impenetrable to the tourists in the Mall. No explanation of what anyone “had” or what they “wanted,” let alone who they were nor why they were there.

I’ve seen flash mobs with more coherent messaging to the outside world. Those near us looked puzzled.

We now take a brief interlude to watch the video of perhaps the most “exciting” thing the ARD did in Independence National Historic Park, leave.

(This is me, shaking my head, completely puzzled)

Throughout the two minutes worth of footage they chanted. In an act of pure mercy to viewers, we’ve stripped off the broken record chanting, (well that, and I was on the phone nearby.)

So they lengthened out into a group and began walking down the sidewalk holding signs and chanting their bizarre chant and headed off to the convention center.

Their numbers had varied over the course of the morning at People’s Plaza, slowly building over time. But when the time finally came from them to step off and begin their sidewalk ‘march’ a total of 66 people (give or take one or two) set off towards the convention center.

Yes, that’s right, all this internet noise and hoopla over 66 people.

Just goes to show what a small pond and echo chamber adoptionland can be.

As I said in my first piece about this year’s ARD Philly (See my section on “Shifting event premise, conceptual, tactical, and strategic problems”),

The bottom line is, there is no adoptee rights mass movement waiting in the wings somewhere to show up for such an event.

For those of you interested in the demographics?

66 total:

• 51 Women
• 13 Men (adults)
• 2 teenage boys

Which means those ‘marching’ in the ARD this year were 77% female, 23% male.

Here in this last picture taken on the Mall, you can see what they looked like having crossed and now heading down the street.

Keep in mind, I said step off from the People’s Plaza was pretty much noon.

We decided to head down and see the other end. The convention center is a little under a mile away, roughly 8 blocks worth of a sidewalk ‘march’. So we headed over to take a look.

Fortunately, I missed at least some of the ‘festivities.’ One participant’s blogged account of the ‘march’ included this tidbit:

One adoptee occasionally yelled out, or asked women as they approached, “Are you my mommy?”

Not ‘merely’ a messaging problem, or a mental health problem, this unfortunately goes to the heart of the lack of sensitivity to context some of those making the ARD happen and responsible for the ARD have displayed over and over again.

Behavior such as this (particularly while claiming to represent “adoptee rights”) is beyond mere problematic, it’s unconscionable.

As if that weren’t bad enough all by itself, this year’s event in Philadelphia far from taking place in a vacuum, was unfortunately taking place in the context of a lawsuit in Camden, New Jersey, directly across the river, less than three miles away from where the ARD was taking place. It involved allegations of “undesired contact” with a surrendered adoptee: Distraught woman sues, alleging N.J. helped child of rape find her. (Obviously, I have a great deal to say about the case, but for the moment, let’s stay on track, saving such for another day.)

This particular article hit roughly a month before the ARD. At least some people involved in the ARD were well aware of the case, as it cluttered adoption venue after adoption related blog, press release, news story, etc.

Amy Adoptee, who was on last year’s committee, blathered delusionally and incoherently on her blog about the article, postulating the lawsuit’s entire existence was a direct response to, and retaliation against the work of open records activists and the ARD:

I do believe that this entire situation is in response to both the Adoptee Rights Demonstration and New Jersey’s bill

She’s convinced it’s all a BIG CONSPIRACY and can’t fathom why a Philly paper would cover a story from just across the river.

The placement of this story in the Philly newspaper is also suspicious as the Adoptee Rights Demonstration in Philadelphia is set to occur a month later. The information in this article is about constituents in New Jersey, not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lest anyone think my bringing up the broader context would be making a mountain out of a molehill, care to guess what the Philadelphia Inquirer’s ( don’t get me started) article, Adoption-records advocates to protest in Phila., published the day of the ARD included?

Privacy clearly is a concern.

In New Jersey, an Atlantic City woman is suing the state for $1 million after being approached by a daughter she surrendered 30 years ago, a child conceived by rape, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. She claims state authorities provided personal information that enabled her daughter to show up at her door.

Just a helpful hint, wandering up to total strangers on the street and pulling an

(for those unfamiliar, see the “plot summary” here) does not tend to make adopted people appear particularly trustworthy, able to conduct their own interfamily affairs, or for that matter stable, let alone sane.

But it does play perfectly into the larger narrative of “unwanted contact” and out of control adoptees. You know, that mythic archetype of the adoptee as always in a needly, reunion obsessed, consent and boundary violating, unable to cope, constantly in psychological dire need-to-find-Mommy state.

Pulling crap like that out on the public streets of Philadelphia, going up to women, total strangers, and demanding to know if they might be one’s long lost parent is a slap in the face to most Bastards’ reality, the sensitivity and delicacy with which MOST approach initial contact with potential kin. It’s a mockery, a mere cartoon of most of our reunion experiences or desires for such.

It plays into every expectation of the bad adoptee, and the picture so often painted of us by our opponents as out of control needy reunion obsessed nuts.

None of which has a damn thing to do with genuine records access, and equal treatment under law.

My complete disgust aside for the moment, back to the Convention Center.

When we first arrived roughly 12:25, there were a number of sign holding ARD supporters standing on the sidewalk along the convention center mostly clumped in small groups all over again. Participants were being interviewed, but by and large it entailed standing around.

Driving past, this is what it looked like by 12:32. The convention center is to the right, you can make out the first of the sign holders to the right of the tree, holding the sign, “How would it feel if you were denied?” (Denied what? Who knows.)

This was the initial thing those going past saw, not an arching statement building a narrative and providing any form of explanation of the next few sign holders further along. Nope, just another piece of completely decontextualized irrelevancy. Another missed opportunity.

d

Unfortunately the visual metaphor of a big red “denied” stamp, while close-ER, is still not it either.

Most Bastards will never have the absolutist clarity of a big red stamp on a piece a paper. Nope, we don’t even get the “gratification” of having a “DENIED” slip of paper to show for our troubles.

The more fitting visual metaphor would be an Empty Mailbox.

We fill out the request forms, we pay our money at Vital Statistics offices (only to be offered a state fabricated lie).

We re-apply, we write, we call, meet with those on Judge’s staffs, we contact legislators, we advocate, we do demonstrations, we ask politely, we write letters to the editor, and we fight for restored access, but each and every passing day of lack of access to our own authentic original unaltered birth certificates is another day of waiting, of checking, of finding nothing but an unresponsive government on the other end.

No mail today, none yesterday, and barring the unforeseen none tomorrow. We check methodically, every day, but the box is always empty.

No big red stamp, just silence, from those who feel they owe us nothing, and do not answer to us.

Outside the convention center?

Things were fizzling out.

There were still a few small clusters, but things had mostly broken up.

Signs were up against the convention center wall, often upside down. (Bear in mind that some in these pictures are uninvolved pedestrians.)

More of the stragglers, near an entrance an interview with a private camera (not news media) was ongoing.

Here’s what the ‘denied’ (birth certificate) sign looks like upside down and from a distance.

And the shot I could find with the most ARD participants in it from this time period.

The area they occupied was directly across from Reading Terminal market, an area with tons of ‘foot traffic’ on a market day like Tuesday. This was busy downtown Philly in the 12:30 lunch hour. Yet the Adoptee Rights Demonstration appears to have viewed the convention center as more of an end point than a key place to be for an extended period. Yet another missed opportunity.

We ‘circled’ the block to be certain we were not missing a larger group at another entrance, stunned that it could be this small this quickly, but by 12:38 there was little left.

The interview with the private camera continued near the entrance and a couple of people with their signs remained, but to the right of the ‘tunnel’ we found all of four ARD participants.

Here’s the “NOW!” sign.

By this point, the event was over and people were heading on in search of drinks at the Hard Rock, which was followed by a trip to a comedy club that evening.

RECAP

So let’s recap, step off from People’s Plaza was roughly noon and by 12:38 it was over.

I didn’t note precisely what time they arrived at the convention center, but clearly the bulk of the ARD participants spent less than 1/2 an hour sign holding there.

Which means they spent almost 3 times as much time standing around in the drizzle not doing much of anything at People’s Plaza than they did protesting at their target.

This is one of those rare moments that simply leaves me “holding my head like a stunned monkey.”

Yes, they will have the booth inside the convention and will be marketing as best they can alongside the other exhibitors over the next few days, but that task will be left to a small subset.

Most of those participating on the day of the ARD stood around waiting in the misty rainish morning, took a rather noisy walk, and then sign held for a few minutes outside a building.

In the final calculation, it amounted to this roughly 40 minutes worth of fewer than 70 people actually ‘marching’ down the sidewalk, signholding, being a “presence” etc.

The Adoptee Rights Committee behind the ARD laid out this rough “budget” of sorts, from their Donate page,

The Philadelphia Adoptee Rights Demonstration has a base target goal of $2,000 for the protest. This money will be used to pay for permits, security, advertising and materials. For an additional $2,000, we will again be able to afford a booth inside the Convention Center.

They relied on the broader community of those who support restoration of records access to foot the bill and in two years have never had to account for the financial realities of the ARD.

Now that the “protest” portion of the event has taken place, perhaps it’s time for a some careful cost-benefit evaluation.

By way of ‘coverage,’ it’s been pretty slim pickings:

Here’s the ARD’s own sparse twitterstream from the event, and now in the aftermath from the booth inside the National Conference of State Legislators exhibitor’s hall.

Today in the aftermath, Philly.com, (also owned by the Philadelphia Inquirer) carried this piece by way of wrap up, Adoptees protest for access to original birth certificates. Once again, reunion focused messaging is portrayed as the prime motivator for why Adult Adoptees would seek access to their Original Birth Certificates.

None of those groups were present yesterday – nor did they need to be. They’re winning the argument, noted adoptee Dan Haines of Egg Harbor. That forces adoptees to mount a state- by- state appeal to lawmakers that could go on forever. And while that happens, he said, birth parents grow old and die.

That fact lends urgency to what adoptees call the nation’s last civil-rights battle.

( I’d HARDLY call us the “last civil rights battle!” There are still plenty of other frontiers…)

Still it’s not a terribly surprising ‘justification’ for the event/adoptee ‘activism’ considering much of the messaging coming from the ARD, such as the photo included with the article.

Photo: John Costello / The Philadelphia Inquirer

Finally, (only semi-amusingly) several people with, as well as the ARD homepage itself, appear to have mistaken Examiner.com for a newspaper or some other form of hard media.

In reality it is an online ‘content’ generator not dissimilar to about.com. (See this Examiner.com press release for an overview on their more than 4,000 “Examiners”/paid content generators. It’s out of date, they’re now up to well over 8,000. (Also see their Quality Writers Wanted: Join us page.) Space filling junk like this Live reports from today’s Adoptee Rights Demonstration pointing at ARD’s twitterstream hardly passes for “coverage.”

By way of blog coverage in the aftermath by those involved, from the ARD homepage: Greetings from Philadelphia (7-22-09, Day after the event)

(In which they bemoan what they perceived as the “miserable rain” and thanked those who showed up and to endure such.)

Kali’s “Anti-Adoption” blog: The Adoptee Rights Demonstration Philladelphia does it again!

In which she, as “founder” of the event, leads off with an interesting admission about last year in New Orleans and this year’s numbers.

Three times the amount of protestors there last year…

Just as I had suspected, I was being quite generous in my morning after recap of last year,

This New Orleans Times Picayune Article, poorly entitled Protesters seek to change laws sealing birth papers came out today, July 23rd.

It mentions “about 60 protesters” took part in the march from Lafayette Park to the Ernest N. Morial convention center.

This year’s numbers being what they are, again a mere 66 people, give or take one or two, marched out of the Park. If last year’s was 1/3 the size, that’s a rather startling admission.

She continues on, insisting that the ARD will go on and on, becoming an annual occurance (paid for by the broader community of those who support open records of course).

The Adoptee Rights Demonstration will never give up, it will continue year after year if it takes until I am one hundred I will be there at the convention, writing my leggies, introducing bills and voting those in office against adoptees equality OUT and getting people who support us in will happen if necessary!

An interesting insistence in light of my post she commented on the night before this year’s ARD, questioning the effectiveness of the tactic, the ARD’s finances, and the notion of becoming an annual habit.

Naturally, the “rain” has taken on a mythology all its own, becoming part of the ARD Philly narrative. Kali adds her notion of participants as dedicated to slog it out through the rains.

You know it means the heart and soul to someone when they’re willing to do it in the rain!

Sigh. Pretty much any “activist” who would even consider being dissuaded by the light misty drizzle that let up long before step off probably hasn’t earned the title street “activist… .”

I suppose for this reason alone it was worth the trip.

Someone had to be there to reality check whether it was torrential rains or merely the slight mistiness in the air that it had devolved down to by the time the ‘march’ began.

Emphasizing the rain as some kind of ‘oh see how dedicated’ or ‘look how much they suffered for the cause’ nonsense, is just a load of crap.

Finally, it’s important to look at what kind of media is internally produced by participants themselves using the footage gathered at the event and how participants are characterized in such:

“Forgotten Children”

Because apparently, there’s nothing like relabeling ADULT adoptees “forgotten children,” set to a ‘cheerful’ little tune, suitable for slitting one’s wrists to.

(Sarcasm kids, sarcasm.)

]]> http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/23/adoptee-rights-demonstration-photographs-and-video-missed-opportunities-abound/feed/ 23 http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/20/philadelphia-this-years-adoptee-rights-demonstration-adoptee-rights-day/ http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/20/philadelphia-this-years-adoptee-rights-demonstration-adoptee-rights-day/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:16:25 +0000 Baby Love Child http://www.babylovechild.org/?p=739 So it’s been almost a year since this version of the “Adoptee Rights Demonstration,” or ARD, held their initial event in New Orleans. This year, as their event centers around buying a booth inside the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) exhibit hall, they will be gathering in Philadelphia.

Once again, they still have yet to attract a single adoptee rights /open records membership organization as a co-sponsor. (This year, same as last year, their two sponsors include a cafepress shop and a podcast.)

The ARD itself lacks any form of structure beyond a central organizing “coalition” of individuals. It has donors, yet no rights, ability to vote, nor membership structure is implied by such. It lacks any form of formalized organization responsible for it.

When those speaking for the ARD in the booth or writing legislators do so, they speak for themselves, not any larger organization of the Adoptee Rights movement internationally.

(Speaking personally, obviously, I support individual actions. This blog and its independence are examples of that. That said however, it is important to differentiate when one is speaking as an individual from times one speaks for a broader organization or movement. The ARD cannot and does not speak for many of us long term adoptee rights advocates, nor any other formal organization.)

Unfortunately, the financial questions at the core of last year’s event still remain.

Those responsible for this Adoptee Rights Demonstration, the self described “Adoptee Rights Coalition,” to date have not provided any form of accounting for last year’s financial donations: those who gave, how many people donated, how much money, nor how it was spent. They’ve had a year, yet no financial report has been forthcoming.

Such an accounting is particularly important in light of the ARD’s lack of charitable donation status, lack of fiscal agent, and the fact that at least some of the donations from last year went directly into Kali Coultas’s personal account. As the date for last year’s ARD approached, they increasingly had problems with the Paypal account being shut down. There has never been visibility into nor accounting to the broader adoptee rights community as to where their money went.

In essence, those responsible for last year’s ARD asked the broader Adoptee Rights Community to trust them, yet provided no means by which to hold them accountable for either the financial aspects of the event, nor ultimately showing any form of political result. (Which I’ll address here in a minute.)

Monies were collected last year for a full page advertisement in the New Orleans Times Picayune that was to list names of individual supporters of the ARD event in NOLA. No disclaimer was placed on the collection of those monies stating that were not enough collected, or if the monies were needed for other purposes, they could be shifted to other projects. Yet when last year’s event took place, no advertisement was run and no monies were refunded. There was, in fact, no explanation offered.

Sadly the lack of promised advertisement was to be but one example of the complete lack of visibility into the finances of the ARD.

This year is no better. The Paypal donation page linked off the Adoptee Rights Demonstration homepage simply transfers funds to “Adoptee Rights Demonstration” (reference adopteerightsdotnet) an unverifed account.

Since I last wrote about the upcoming event in Philly, the “Adoptee Rights Coalition” (those responsible for the events) have added a few names. It now consists of:

Kali Coultas / Founder

Michelle Edmunds

Joy Madsen

Cathy Robishaw

Heather Holmes

Theresa Hood

Dory Martin

Diane Crossfield

and Jimm Mandenberg

(”Founder” is quite a stretch, considering the pre-existing history with the term “Adoptee Rights Demonstration” and the history of the way Kali ended up with it, but that’s a tale I’ve covered here before.)

Sadly, I think a number well intentioned and very serious about regaining records access people have ended up supporting the ARD. To my thinking at least, there is quite a difference between some of the folks who show up and some of those who can only be described as running the thing.

If you stumbled across it for the first time on facebook, or heard of it via a blog which has picked up the marketing, you may know nothing of the history, the many lingering issues from last year going into this year, or the personal viciousness that took place last year directed at longtime open records activists and Bastard Nation.

Further, as some number of people supporting or participating may be new to adoptee rights work itself, they may have little to measure the effectiveness or lack thereof of the ARD against.

As I mentioned previously on the history link above, clearly the vision for the event itself has changed greatly from Ron Morgan’s original inception. Clearly, by any measure, the current ARD is not the sort of mass action event originally envisioned.

Yet original vision aside, even judging it purely upon what last year’s event set out to do, its effectiveness even by that measure raises serious questions about whether or not the finances and efforts put into such ultimately make sense, or instead distract from the real work to be done.

Part of the disconnect appears to be structural.

Some of those donating do so in hopes of having people go to Philly to go essentially speak and work on their behalf. Meanwhile, those organizing the event are clearly viewing their presence as merely the prelude to what they want people back home to do. Each ends up staring at the other expecting SOMEONE else to do something. Donors want people to speak with their legislators via the purchased booth, those in the booth, apparently think they are collecting contacts for those back home to work on.

What measurable follow up has there been since last year? How many meetings in home districts? How many sponsors were gained? How many pieces of legislation were introduced as a direct result of buying exhibit space in New Orelans? What tangible milestones were marked as a direct result of having done so?

In short, what has been the cost benefit analysis of the strategy of having a few people “marching” on sidewalks without a permit, and buying a booth in the convention center?

While they can claim “contacts were made” has there been any genuine analysis on whether or not who they were talking to were ‘the right people’ or not? I.e. did they connect with people genuinely in a position to get legislation enacted (and did they then begin to work towards such?) or did they expend their time speaking with people with little to no genuine power to enact actual change? Do they even know?

Is this a strategy that actually makes sense? What has doing so done in terms of the goal, restoration of records access to the maximum number of people?

Oh, but wait, IS that their ultimate goal?

Let’s take a look.

As always, all we have are their own words and actions to go by.

From here:

All proceeds go to The Philadelphia Adoptee Rights Demonstration to help pay for permits, security, advertising and our ultimate goal, a booth inside the Annual Summit of The National Conference of State Legislatures.

from here:

Our goal is to maintain a presence at the Annual Summit of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

and from here:

We believe an annual presence at the NCSL Summit demonstrates the importance of this issue, and awakens those impacted by secrecy laws and subsequent treatment by states withholding personal information at various vital information offices across the country. A presence inside the booth is crucial to prove the seriousness of our intent to those who need to hear the message.

Let’s be realistic here, what they are discussing is a booth, one of many, all vying for attention and moments of time with staffers and some state legislators in the exhibition hall alongside plenty of other booths attempting exactly the same.

If the people attempting to market open records don’t even understand the difference between their nonsensical term “vital information offices” and state’s vital statistics offices, no amount of paying their entrance fees is going to help gain genuine open records.

Yes, alongside their stated “goal” of being a “presence,” there are other statements about records restoration, but since when did “maintaining a presence” become any kind “goal?”

See, for me? Even back when I was a member of the committee for last year’s ARD (before I and others resigned) a booth at the event was a TACTIC, never a goal.

It was a tactic being utilized towards the goal of records access restoration.

It was never an ends in and of itself. The idea of listing the upcoming cities the NCSL will take place in for the next three years down the side of the webpage under the heading

“Future Adoptee Rights Demonstrations at the NCSL”

means that for those running the ARD, they view this as a habit to get into, an annual vacation to plan on, and an annual event they expect to be able to count on the broader records access community to fund.

Not planned obsolescence.

I was working hard towards the idea of looking forward to the day of not having to booth such an event ever again. I was working towards the day when records access was restored and attending such an event would become unnecessary.

Furthermore, had I participated last year, in the aftermath, there would have been a careful assessment of whether or not the tactic had been successful, what the cost/benefit ratio was, and whether or not repeating such even still made sense. IF going forward, the tactic was to be repeated, there would have to be some very tangible (and marketable to the broader community) results justifying doing so again.

Taking up space at the NCSL as some kind of theraputic annual gathering for online buddies to finally meet one another and drink together, and (for example) listen to jazz musicians that they cannot even bother to get the names of is not genuine activism. It may be a working out of personal issues, and need for friends, but it doesn’t justify an ongoing utilization of the goodwill and pocketbooks of the broader adoptee community.

Vacations and parties and raffles can all be nice things, but if doing so means losing track of the real goal, such that an annual “presence” is suddenly on the list of “goals,” then genuine accomplishment has fallen by the wayside. It’s about keeping one’s eye on the ball, and failure to do so.

Basic messaging seems to be an ongoing problem for the ARD, starting with statements such as this from their demonstration details page:

All Americans, adopted or not, have a right to access government records about their own lives.

which they then immediately contradict:

Adult adoptees in most of the advanced, industrialized nations of the world have unrestricted access to their original birth records as a matter of right. In contrast, adult adoptees in all but six states in the U.S. are forbidden unrestricted access to their own original birth certificates, due to archaic laws that are a legacy of a culture of shame that stigmatized infertility, out-of-wedlock birth and adoption.

Obviously if we ALREADY HAD the right to full access there would be no need to hold an event such as ARD. Adult Adoptees would not have to organize, march, nor lobby for restored records access.

Clearly in our day to day lives we do not experience that equitable treatment that would put us on equal footing with all others.

That would be the entire premise for the ARD itself, yet how do they begin the page describing their event? By essentially saying there is no need for the event (except there is.)

Such self contradictory messaging is hardly the kind of ‘voice’ I would want representing my needs to legislators.

The messaging problems that a number of us brought up prior to our resignation last year still persist, such as the insistence upon utilizing a (family) tree based logo more indicative of search and reunion and personal quest to ‘know one’s roots’ than a rights based or records restoration based visual.

The ongoing conflation of restored records access with search and reunion is front and center in this year’s ARD page via their searchers page, on which they state,

The purpose of the Adoptee Rights Demonstration is to serve as an annual rally for those who care deeply about restoring unconditional access to all Americans. However, we realize that search is an important topic to many involved. To that end, we have compiled the following list of state specific search and reunion links and information.

When several of us pointed out last year that this only served to increase confusion and the tangling of open records with search and reunion, Kali’s excuse was that most of the people coming into the webpage were looking for search and reunion resources.

She wanted to use the provision of “search resources” as a hook to draw people into the page and increase web traffic.

Never mind the fact that genuine records restoration is not about the personal quest to reunite. It is about restoring equitable treatment to a class of people who have been wronged by the State.

Such intentional conflations of the two: records access and search and reunion, only leads to additional conflated legislation such as reunion registries, etc which bypass genuine restored access, and are attempts at placating those enduring inequitable treatment under law.

Worse, the ARD page markets itself towards legislative visitors as well. How they expect legislators unfamiliar with our issues to decipher search and reunion as distinct from records restoration when the supposed advocates thereof place them side by side is beyond me. It’s a ‘what the hell were they thinking?’ visual.

Finally, let’s take a moment to revisit the ongoing issue of the finances.

Lest last year’s troubling pattern of financial decisions not be enough to raise eyebrows, this year’s event features a new troubling twist: a payback for participating for one lucky winner.

This one falls under the heading of things I simply could not make up if I tried. I attended my first large scale national protest event in Washington DC back in 1986. In the 23 years I’ve been ‘doing activism’ I have to say, I’ve never quite run across a one of these:

Prizes to be won in Philly

The Adoptee Rights Committee is pleased to announce a draw to be held *July 22, 2009 *following the Adoptee Rights Demonstration.

First prize is a *$100 VISA gift certificate* – always useful for travelers! Second and third prizes will also be awarded. The prizes have been donated by the Adoptee Rights Demonstration organizers as a way to thank protesters for their much-appreciated participation.

Protesters will be asked to enter their names either at the sign-making party the evening before, or immediately after the demonstration. The drawing will take place at a local restaurant (TBD) following the demonstration, where we will gather for rest, hydration, conversation and camaraderie.

Yup, it’s the ‘please come to Philly, you could win a Visa gift certificate’ pitch! Errrr, ‘come to Philly and fill out our database’ pitch.

Prizes for ‘protesting.’ Bribes for bodies?

As advertised on their Twitterstream:

100 reasons to come to the Philadelphia Adoptee Rights Demonstration! http://tr.im/jJB6

That’s bad enough in and off itself, after all, usually, protesters show up all on their own, without any expectation of a potential payoff for having done so, but the real question, once again, lies in the donations.

Are we talking about monies donated out of the ‘coalition’ members own pockets, or are we talking about the ‘coalition’ committee setting aside a portion of the event donations for this purpose?

If the latter, then the question becomes, did those donating to the event understand at the time that a portion of their donation could be used as reward “prize money” for demonstrators?

Usually, when people donate to a cause, they expect the funds to actually be used for the cause itself, not as a form of kickback to participants.

Again, having no explanation of the finances of the ARD, the answer to whether the money came out of donations or personal pockets remains simply unknown.

We can, however look at the few items they list as what donations should be designated towards in their fundraising to date.

The ARD cafepress page for example, lists some of the items the proceeds were to go to (although note that no specific line item budget has ever been released by those responsible for the ARD):

Adoptee Rights Day – July 21, 2009 – Philadelphia

http://www.cafepress.com/AdopteeRightsPA

20% is added to the base price of every item. All proceeds go to The Philadelphia Adoptee Rights Demonstration to help pay for permits, security, advertising and our ultimate goal, a booth inside the Annual Summit of The National Conference of State Legislatures. Your purchase is deeply appreciated!

Nothing in that about monetary prizes to participants.

Likewise, nothing on the Donate page,

The Philadelphia Adoptee Rights Demonstration has a base target goal of $2,000 for the protest. This money will be used to pay for permits, security, advertising and materials. For an additional $2,000, we will again be able to afford a booth inside the Convention Center.

Nor their sponsors page.

As “Adoptees Unite “is listed as one of the ARD sponsors, it’s likewise interesting to take a quick visit across to Adult Adoptees Advocating for Change’s cafe press shop:

http://www.cafepress.com/adopteesunite

100% of the profits of sales will be donated to help fund the 2009 Adoptee Rights Protest in Philadelphia.

Despite there being no accounting of where the funding is actually going, they make a final pitch to every individual “protester,”

We are asking protesters to consider supporting the demonstration by making a small $5.00 donation towards expenses. Please note that this donation is not mandatory, and no one will be excluded from the event if they do not donate.

That’s right up there with some of the ‘not required, but suggested’ pay to march ‘activist’ parades.

Again, most events I’ve been supportive of over the years welcome participants and don’t offer up “suggested donation” amounts. If participants chose to give a donation, it tends to come of deep personal conviction, not expectation.

Just when you thought the mess out in California couldn’t get any stupider, AB 372 now apparently is projected to come with an 8 million dollar start up cost.

Yes, you read that right $8 million, even as California is in the depths of fiscal crisis and budget hearings. (It’s really impossible to pick any one link as any form of overview of the situation in CA, if you’re not familiar with the the budgetary crisis a simple websearch will turn of more than enough articles to get you up to speed.)

AB 372 as currently proposed is simply insane, completely fiscally irresponsible, and absolutely unwarranted.

Other states have achieved genuine open records legislation without a high price tag fiscal note attached. Now CA wants to give adopted adults (over age 25, no less!) an insulting half-assed ‘faint possibilities of maybe-access sometimes sorta’ AND couple it with an $8,000,000 price tag? Positively shameful.

Tomorrow morning the bill goes before the Committee.

Go read the Bastard Nation action alert, then make your calls and send your emails. If you’re in CA and can make the hearing tomorrow morning by all means, attend in person.

CAL OPEN/BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT- CAL AB 372. ACT NOW!

The author’s office has stated there is an $8 Million start up cost estimate attached to the bill.

Otherwise,

You can watch and listen LIVE to the hearing via the internet:
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Room Number 4202
9:00 AM (PST)
click here
(Click on Committee Room List)

You can find the full bill text, last modified May 7th, here

Also see the Bill Analysis

As well as the previous unanimous passage vote tally in the Appropriations Committee.

Rubber stamping AB 372 on through the committee vote is not an acceptable outcome.

Not acceptable to adopted people and our families, and not acceptable for California itself.

Show up, call and write to demand better.